Star Trek so far hasn’t been quite as ‘preachy’ in its messages as later shows.
This, however, was a bit of an exception. The ‘nuclear weapons are bad’ bit was way too direct. And a little nonsensical – there doesn’t seem to be a lot of connection in my mind between nuclear weapons and autonomous planet killing machines.
Things develop quite nicely through the episode, and there is a nice sense of the powerlessness of the Enterprise compared to the ship. it’s interesting that the crew seem much more willing to accept this in a ship, whereas anything planet borne and it’s ‘break out the ship’s phasers’.
Still, overall this was a pretty average episode – nothing spectacularly great, and nothing spectacularly poor.
35 down, 702 to go.